This invention relates generally to social networking and, in particular, to a system for enabling users of a social networking system to answer questions asked by other users of the social networking system.
Traditional question and answer software systems rely on documents that answer questions posed by users. A question entered by a user is searched using natural language processing systems to retrieve documents that answer the question. Often, the documents that are presented to the user do not specifically answer the question entered, and instead simply offer an encyclopedic explanation of the general topic of the question.
User-generated content question and answer systems have emerged in recent years to address this problem. A user posts a question to a forum, and another user answers the question. The answering user may or may not be an expert in the topic of the question. In fact, the answering user could simply be browsing questions in the forum, completely unrelated to the user asking the question. The questioning user has no way to judge the expertise of the answering user. The user posing the question classifies the question under as specific topic and waits for other users to answer the question. Because a user may not “tag” or classify the question under other related topics, the question may remain unanswered, or answers may be incorrect or incomplete. To maintain quality control, these systems rely on human moderators to monitor newly created questions and manually modify the topic of an incorrectly or incompletely tagged question with the correct tag(s).
Social networking systems enable users to communicate and interact with other users on an ongoing basis. Question and answer systems have not enabled users to interact with relevant questions and answers from other users they are connected to. As the number of users of a social networking system grows, the number of questions asked may overwhelm users and moderators of the question and answer system. Finding relevant questions to answer becomes more challenging as the number of questions and answers grow exponentially. Additionally, duplicative questions and answers may discourage users from using the question and answer service. Tools are needed to address these problems.